New theory says Big Bang was "big freeze"

[cruising for burgers]

space, time, life itself...

[Guest sirch]

do all wannabe-scientists call the peopl and things they don't understand, "retarded"?

 

 

hmmm, yeah sounds very scientific-like to me! hahaha

 

what a wanker... luke.. what'sisname.

[goDel]

I actually had heard of the Big Chill before, but the Big Freeze. No.

[Guest sirch]

I actually had heard of the Big Chill before, but the Big Freeze. No.

 

yeah the big chill is a concert over ere... proper good and shit...

[goDel]

That's where space and time emerge. I'd blame the acid, btw. But I wouldn't get too cosmological about it.

[Hautlle]

It's this:

 

Originally, at extremely high temperatures, the building blocks were like liquid water: they contained no structure, "representing a state with no space," the researchers wrote in their paper. At the moment of the Big Bang, when the temperature in the universe dropped to the space-time building blocks' "freezing point," they crystallized to form the four-dimensional lattice we observe today.

 

that I'm not following. It just doesn't even sound accurate as an analogy. Liquid water contains no structure? Not as far as I can tell. Liquid certainly isn't a good analogy for "representing a state with no space," but again, I'm just gonna assume I'm missing something here. I also don't know why cooling would necessarily imply crystallization; we're not actually talking about a cooled liquid. I wonder if these scientists have a plan for how to measure these spacecracks...

 

And since we're expanding, what's happening to the discrete space units? Are they getting bigger? More plentiful? Are they stretching and will they rip apart eventually?

 

Liquid water contains no repeatable structure other than the molecules themselves and even they slide around each other/move about (there is no translational/rotational symmetrical lattice). There is no repeatable structure as there is in a crystal.

 

*Thanks mineralogy

[Guest sirch]

wank. no time for human theories, please. c'mon now... we have an approximate 75 year life span (deduct 20 if you're from scotland) to enjoy and ingest all the fucking insignificant bollocks that all these fucking people make on this rock...

[syd syside]

The Big Frosty... yep that neighborhood fella is made of snow and he made you.

 

[gmanyo]

It's this:

 

Originally, at extremely high temperatures, the building blocks were like liquid water: they contained no structure, "representing a state with no space," the researchers wrote in their paper. At the moment of the Big Bang, when the temperature in the universe dropped to the space-time building blocks' "freezing point," they crystallized to form the four-dimensional lattice we observe today.

 

that I'm not following. It just doesn't even sound accurate as an analogy. Liquid water contains no structure? Not as far as I can tell. Liquid certainly isn't a good analogy for "representing a state with no space," but again, I'm just gonna assume I'm missing something here. I also don't know why cooling would necessarily imply crystallization; we're not actually talking about a cooled liquid. I wonder if these scientists have a plan for how to measure these spacecracks...

 

And since we're expanding, what's happening to the discrete space units? Are they getting bigger? More plentiful? Are they stretching and will they rip apart eventually?

 

Liquid water contains no repeatable structure other than the molecules themselves and even they slide around each other/move about (there is no translational/rotational symmetrical lattice). There is no repeatable structure as there is in a crystal.

 

*Thanks mineralogy

 

But then what is "heat"?

[luke viia]

Ah, ok, thanks hautlle, that kind of clears up that part of their analogy for me. The temperature analogy is still a little strange to me, but whatever. Hopefully something interesting comes of their theory.

[GORDO]

A phase change is more easily exemplified by the freezing of water, it doesn't mean that they are actually saying the universe was liquid and then froze.

 

A phase change means that a system had certain qualitative properties and after a parameter crosses certain critical value these qualitative properties change radically. like how water changes from liquid to solid once the critical value of 0 Degrees Celsius is crossed. pretty much makes sense if you think in terms of "before the universe" and "after the universe".

[luke viia]

Thanks, and right, I get what a phase change is. The analogy just didn't sit well with me last night (too much beer). cheers

[gmanyo]

But why do they keep saying "lost heat"? In what way did the "particles" lose "energy"? Were they values that just lost the ability to change at the rates that they formerly did?

[Guest theSun]

interesting theory

 

The math describing the theory checks out, but "the challenge has been that these building blocks of space are very small, and so impossible to see directly," Quach explained. From the human vantage point, space-time looks smooth and continuous.

 

this is really vague, but i'm not a mathematician so i probably won't understand anyway. still seems a bit off

[Guest Babar]

we're just another branch of the great fractal

 

oh hey.

So basically these guy see a link between the big bang and phase transitions. This is interesting not because phase transitions are fractal but because they always follow the same order : for instance solid, liquid, gas. Drawing a link between the big bang and freezing water enables us to move onto questions such as : "Can the universe unfreeze ?" or "Will the universe evaporate" ?Of course if you want to take these statements seriously, you have to deterritorialize their meaning : taking words or concept coming from the field of chemistry and extend, generalize them to encompass cosmic phenomenons. You end up with some kind of metamodel that doesn't model chemical substances or cosmic events per se but applies to both. At this point, one might wonder if a theory unifying phase transitions (either in water or in the universe) shouldn't be considered as some kind of metaphysics, i.e., knowledge that doesn't apply to one specific branch of physics but potentially to all of them.

My point is the following : this soon-to-be-born theory, in spite of the importance we attach to the subject-matter it covers -- the universe -- is not that ground-breaking from an epistemological standpoint. This is not the first time concepts coming from one field of science is adopted in another field. What I think is the most prominent barrier to interdisciplinarity is not finding how to pours knowledge from one science to another, but seeing what discoveries coming from different sciences have in common.

And I don't think the answer to the latter can come from a physicalist/experimentalist perspective for the reason I think this approach can only lead factoring two discoveries (the big-bang, chemical substances modification under temperature change) one level-up (a theory that explain both phenomenon), until another similar discovery coming from another field force you to reconsider your model, etc, possibly ad inifinitum.

Personnally, I believe the ability to see similarities between two different phenomenons relies on that thing scientific practice puts on display every day, that thing each particular science in its own field of study cannot explain and that yet sustain, at a lower level, all its reasonings .

 

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8961/

This paper is the third and final one in a sequence of three. All three papers emphasize that a proposition can be justified by an infinite regress, on condition that epistemic justification is interpreted probabilistically. The first two papers showed this for one-dimensional chains and for one-dimensional loops of propositions, each proposition being justified probabilistically by its precursor. In the present paper we consider the more complicated case of two-dimensional nets, where each ‘child’ proposition is probabilistically justified by two ‘parent’ propositions. Surprisingly, it turns out that probabilistic justification in two dimensions takes on the form of Mandelbrot’s iteration. Like so many patterns in nature, probabilistic reasoning might in the end be fractal in character.

[SR4]

How did the universe begin? The Big Bang is traditionally envisioned as the moment when an infinitely dense bundle of energy suddenly burst outward, expanding in three spatial directions and gradually cooling down as it did so.

 

Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice.In the new study, lead author James Quach and colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia say the hypothesis can be tested by looking for defects that would have formed in the structure of space-time when the universe crystallized.

 

The universe is currently about 13.7 billion years old."Think of the early universe as being like a liquid," Quach said in a statement. "Then as the universe cools, it 'crystallizes' into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Theorized this way, as the universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice."If they exist, these cracks should be detectable, the researchers said, because light and other particles would bend or reflect off of them as they trek across the cosmos. (The History & Structure of the Universe (Infographic))

 

The notion that space and time are emergent properties that suddenly materialized out of an amorphous state was first put forth by physicists at Canada's Perimeter Institute in 2006. Called "quantum graphity," the theory holds that the four-dimensional geometry of space-time discovered by Albert Einstein is not fundamental; instead, space-time is more like a lattice constructed of discrete space-time building blocks, just like matter looks continuous, but is actually made of building blocks called atoms.

 

Originally, at extremely high temperatures, the building blocks were like liquid water: they contained no structure, "representing a state with no space," the researchers wrote in their paper. At the moment of the Big Bang, when the temperature in the universe dropped to the space-time building blocks' "freezing point," they crystallized to form the four-dimensional lattice we observe today.

 

The math describing the theory checks out, but "the challenge has been that these building blocks of space are very small, and so impossible to see directly," Quach explained. From the human vantage point, space-time looks smooth and continuous.

 

However, while the building blocks themselves might be too small to detect, the physicists hope to observe the boundaries that would have formed as regions of crystallizing building blocks butted against one another at the time of the Big Bang, creating "cracks" in the universe. More work is needed to predict the average distance between the cracks -- it isn't known whether they are microscopic, or light-years apart -- in order to characterize their effects on particles.The research by Quach and his team is detailed in this month's edition of the journal Physical Review D..

 

http://news.discover...nge-120822.html

 

No idea what this would mean for us, but it sounds cool

 

whaaaaa why does this sound so awesome?

 

 

Babar: Are you Hegel in disguise?

[goDel]

*big sneeze*

 

 

*creates new dimensions. liquid dimensions*

[SR4]

i juggle universes in my underpants

[goDel]

haha

 

But that'd be more of a Big Squirt, wouldn't it?

[gaarg]

I missed you, Babar! I love your thoughts.

[Braintree]

The Big Bang.

 

Was Ron Jeremy in that movie?

[Guest Babar]

Babar: Are you Hegel in disguise?

 

Way do you ask ? I tried to read his book about esthetics. Fuck. That's like reading Marx. 3 pages into the book, then out!

I hope you're not accusing me of causing the same effect.

 

Thank you gaarg. I'm still waiting for a description of what it feels to suddenly have an apocalyptically vision in the middle of the woods. Maybe you should make a thread about it !

[goDel]

A thread? Well, at least have gaarg make a drawing about it!